Speak and spell игрушка
Обновлено: 17.05.2024
Background
The Speak & Spell was created by Paul Breedlove, an engineer with Texas Instruments during the late 1970s. Speak & Spell was the first of a three-part talking educational toy series that also included Speak & Read and Speak & Math . The Speak & Spell was sold, with regional variations, in the United States , Canada , Australia , and in Europe .
The toy was originally advertised as a tool for helping young children to become literate, learn to spell and learn the alphabet. The early Speak & Spell units were sold in 1978. Variants included the Speak & Read , which was yellow with blue and green accents and focused on reading comprehension, and the Speak & Math , which was grey with blue and orange and centered on mathematics. A French Speak & Spell, "La Dictée Magique", was sold primarily in Canada, while an Italian "Grillo Parlante" and German "Buddy" were sold in their respective countries. The German "Buddy" is particularly rare. The American version of Speak & Spell had an American accent and American spellings, and the British version used British spellings and had a British accent.
There was another variant called Speak and Spell Compact, it was cheaper as it had no display - an expensive component. This was launched in the US only but was seen as an inferior derivative and sales were very poor. The UK was forced to take some of the excess stock, but seeing the problem this would cause the Marketing Manager (Martin Finn) had the product rebranded Speak and Write for the UK only. All existing units we recoloured blue and repackaged, and it sold well enough to clear the shelves. No more units were made of this model.
The word list used in each of the regional models is different to reflect the recommendations of educationalists in each country. The English, French, German and Italian versions were all created, by a team of non specialists, in TI's plant near Antibes, France, under the watchful eye of Larry Brantingham who had patented the underlying technology.
Electronics
The display was a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). The original Speak & Spells had raised hard-plastic keys while later units had a membrane keyboard. The Speak & Spell used the first single-chip voice synthesizer, the TI TMS5100 , which utilized a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model and the electronic DSP logic. [History Channel,Modern Marvels:"70s Tech", 2007, aired 6:00-7:00pm MST] . A variant of this chip with a very similar voice would eventually be utilized in certain Chrysler vehicles in the 1980s as the Electronic Voice Alert .
Phoneme data was stored on a pair of 128 Kbit metal gate PMOS ROMs. 128 Kbit was a very large capacity ROM in the late 1970s. An additional memory module could be plugged into a slot in the battery compartment and selected via a button on the keyboard.
A later model, the Super Speak & Spell, had a much slimmer case and an LCD screen rather than a VFD screen.
The unit could use either 4 "C" batteries or 6 volt DC power adapter with positive tip polarity.
Games included
Speak & Spell had five built-in learning games: Spell, Say It, Secret Letter, Mystery Code, and Word. Spell is the classic word spelling game, wherein the participant must spell ten words after hearing them "spoken" by the unit. The Speak & Spell also had the ability to expand its vocabulary using expansion modules that plugged into a slot near the battery compartment. One such expansion module was a tie-in for the toy's notable appearance in the movie " E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial " and asked young spellers to try such words as " geranium " and "extraterrestrial."
The secret code works by matching up two sets of the alphabet, slightly askew. P and Q match up and run in opposite directions:
: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z : F E D C B A Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G
Home computer adaptions
Percom Data Company offered a PC Card called "Speak-2-Me-2" which installed into the battery compartment of the Speak & Spell, and connected via cable to a TRS-80 .
East Coast Micro Products offered hardware to inferface 6502-based computers such as the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe with the Speak & Spell. A program called "S.peek.uP" was marketed which could control this hardware.
The February 1983 issue of Computers & Electronics contained instructions for interfacing a Speak & Spell with a
Sinclair ZX-80 a Sinclair ZX-81, or a Timex 1000.
In popular culture
The Speak & Spell shows up from time to time as a pop-culture reference in various television show s and game shows. A Speak & Spell has a prominent role as a key component of the alien creature's homebuilt interstellar communicator in the Steven Spielberg motion picture " E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ". Speak & Spell also appears in the movie " Toy Story ".
Some musician s have used the Speak & Spell in their compositions, sometimes through the use of Circuit Bending . Examples include TLC (Fanmail), Family Force 5 (Cadillac Phunque), Limp Bizkit (Behind Blue Eyes), CocoRosie (Animals), COIL , Scrabbel (Robot Song), LFO, 808 State , Experimental Audio Research, Gym Class Heroes , Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark , Polysics , Leftfield , Beck , Aphex Twin , Venetian Snares , Doormouse , Moog Cookbook , Meat Beat Manifesto , Hexstatic , Darren Emerson , Freezepop, Optiganally Yours , Sigh, Win, Circle Research, and the Artificial Sea. Also used by [http://www.sonicmanipulator.com Claude Woodward (The Sonic Manipulator)] . Two tracks on Eisbrecher 's 2008 album " S%C3%BCnde " include Speak & Spell excerpts.
British synthpop band Depeche Mode entitled their 1981 debut album "Speak & Spell".
Brian Duffy, with the modified toy orchestra creates any vocal parts of songs using a Speak & Spell.
Comedian Dane Cook impersonates a Speak & Spell on his album "Harmful If Swallowed", joking about how the voice sounded like the toy was possessed.
French musician and electronic music godfather Jean Michel Jarre , has used the S&S sound in the track "Touch to Remember" from his latest album " Téo & Téa ".
German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk use a Speak & Spell in several songs on their 1981 album " Computer World ".
The Speak & Spell is referenced several times on Homestar Runner . In one toon, a character has built a robot made out of a box of Grape Nuts and a Speak & Spell.
Speak and Spell was also used by the character Carol Anne Freeling in Poltergeist 3.
In the Bemani song "Look to the Sky" by Sota Fujimori , a Speak & Spell can be heard spelling "S-O-T-A" just before the song's chorus.
References
External links
Wikimedia Foundation . 2010 .
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Speak and Spell — портативное электронное устройство и обучающая игрушка, занимающая очень интересное место в истории. Игрушка/обучающее средство было разработано в конце 1970-х годов компанией Texas Instruments и представлено публике на Летней выставке бытовой электроники в июне 1978 года. Его популярность заключается в том, что Speak and Spell был первым коммерческим продуктом, в котором использовалась совершенно новая технология. , называемой технологией DSP.
«Speak and Инновации в области цифровой обработки сигналов (DSP) в обработке звука являются стартовой вехой для огромной индустрии цифровой обработки сигналов, рынок которой сегодня составляет более 20 миллиардов долларов. Использование цифровой обработки сигналов значительно расширилось с развитием аналогового преобразования в цифровой и из цифрового в аналоговый. микросхемы и методы преобразования. Цифровые сигнальные процессоры используются во многих бытовых, промышленных и военных приложениях «.
Цифровая обработка сигналов
По определению, DSP (сокращение от цифровой обработки сигналов) — это преобразование аналоговой информации в цифровую л. В случае Speak and Spell это была аналоговая «звуковая» информация, которая была преобразована в цифровую форму. Speak and Spell был продуктом, который стал результатом исследований Texas Instruments в области синтетической речи. Обладая способностью «говорить» с детьми, Speak and Spell научил их правильному написанию и произношению слова.
Исследования и разработки Speak and Spell
Speak and Spell ознаменовал собой первый раз, когда голосовой тракт человека был скопирован в электронном виде на одном кристалле кремния. По словам производителей Speak and Spell, Texas Instruments, исследование Speak and Spell началось в 1976 году как трехмесячное технико-экономическое обоснование с бюджетом в 25 000 долларов. Над проектом на ранних стадиях работали четыре человека: Пол Бридлав, Ричард Уиггинс, Ларри Брантингем и Джин Франц.
Идея Speak and Spell возникла с инженером Полом Бридлавом. Бридлав думал о потенциальных продуктах, которые могли бы использовать возможности новой пузырьковой памяти (еще один исследовательский проект Texas Instrument), когда ему пришла в голову идея Speak and Spell, первоначально названная Spelling Bee. В то время как технологии были такими, какими они были в то время, речевые данные требовали значительного объема памяти, и Texas Instruments согласились с Breedlove, что что-то вроде Speak and Spell может быть хорошим приложением для разработки.
В интервью, проведенном Бенджем Эдвардсом из Vintage Computing с одним из членов команды Speak and Spell, Ричардом Виггинсом, Виггинс раскрывает основные роли каждой команды следующим образом:
- Пол Бридлав придумал идею учебного пособия по правописанию..
- Джин Франц отвечал за общий дизайн продукта: написание слов, дизайн корпуса, дисплей и работу.
- Ларри Брантингем был проектировщиком интегральных схем.
- Ричард Виггинс написал алгоритмы обработки голоса.
Solid State Speech Circuitry
Speak and Spell была революционным изобретением. Согласно Texas Instruments, в нем использовалась совершенно новая концепция распознавания речи, и в отличие от магнитофонов и натяжных фотографий, которые использовались во многих говорящих игрушках того времени, твердотельные речевые схемы, которые он использовал, не имели движущихся частей. Когда ему велели что-то сказать, он извлекал слово из памяти, обрабатывал его с помощью модели интегральной схемы голосового тракта человека, а затем говорил с помощью электроники.
Сделано специально для Speak and Spell, Speak and Spell 4 создали первую интегральную схему процессора цифровых сигналов с линейным прогнозирующим кодированием TMS5100. Проще говоря, микросхема TMS5100 была первой из когда-либо созданных ИС синтезатора речи.
Если вам приходилось бегать по магазинам в поисках говорящей игрушки в подарок своему ребенку, то благодарить или проклинать за это следует людей, в 1978 году разработавших «прадедушку» этого технического приспособления.
Для обучения правописанию впервые использована синтезированная речь
На выставке Consumer Electronic Show в июне 1978 года сотрудники компании Texas Instruments Пол Бридлав, Джин Франц, Ричард Уиггинс и Ларри (Джордж) Брантингем представили Speak & Spell — устройство в красно-желтом пластиковом корпусе размером с записную книжку, способное синтезировать человеческую речь.
Четыре года спустя устройство Speak & Spell получило известность в качестве игрушки, которую инопланетянин из блокбастера Спилберга Extra-Terrestrial собрал, чтобы «позвонить домой». Тем не менее популярность этого изобретения была высока с самого начала, как и цена — 60 долл., по тем временам достаточно большая сумма.
Speak & Spell стало первым устройством, в работе которого был использован цифровой процессор обработки сигналов. Синтез человеческого голоса осуществлялся с использованием упреждающего линейного кодирования при создании математической модели речи. Эта модель позволяла генерировать голосовой сигнал на основе предыдущего опыта.
Поговори со мной
После включения Speak & Spell ребенок должен был произнести одно из 200 слов, хранящихся в памяти устройства. Затем ребенок мог набрать то же самое слово на небольшой клавиатуре, клавиши которой располагались в алфавитном порядке. В зависимости от того, правильно или неправильно было набрано слово, игрушка говорила: «Верно» или «Попробуй еще раз».
«Никому и в голову не приходило, что мы сможем создать прибор, разговаривающий человеческим голосом», — говорит Бридлав. В то время двое его детей учились в начальной школе и ему приходилось заниматься с ними правописанием: «Я подумал тогда, что наш электронный помощник должен действовать так же, как родители во время занятий с детьми».
Современные цифровые процессоры, являющиеся потомками цифрового процессора Speak & Spell, используются не только в игрушках, но и в более серьезных приложениях, например при синтезе речи в системе голосовой почты. Цифровые процессоры сигналов по-прежнему применяются и в телефонной связи. Фильмом Спилберга дело не ограничилось, и теперь процессор сигналов лежит в основе работы любого цифрового сотового телефона.
«Мы открыли рог изобилия, — говорит Бридлав. — В наши дни цифровым процессорам нашлись тысячи различных применений».
The Speak & Spell — one of the most iconic toys of the 1980s — is a teaching machine.
By that, I don’t mean simply that it’s an electronic, educational device. It is that, sure.
In his “History of Teaching Machines,” historian of psychology Ludy Benjamin writes that,
“A teaching machine is an automatic or self-controlling device that (a) presents a unit of information (B. F. Skinner would say that the information must be new), (b) provides some means for the learner to respond to the information, and (c) provides feedback about the correctness of the learner’s responses.”
The shared features in most definitions of teaching machines include automation, immediate feedback, and self-pacing. The Speak & Spell has all three, using “contingencies of reinforcement” to establish appropriate spelling behavior. (Some of its engineers thought it would be funny if the user received a raspberry or a funny comment when they spelled a word wrong. But this idea was rejected as it would “reward” incorrect spelling.)
Like so much of education technology, the Speak & Spell takes a behaviorist approach to teaching and learning.
That’s noteworthy, because I would argue that the Speak & Spell has profoundly shaped how we think about electronic educational devices — what we expect these devices to do.
Mobile Computing and Ed-Tech: From Calculators to the Little Professor
Typically the history of the Speak & Spell isn’t traced through B. F. Skinner’s teaching machines but through the calculator. (That being said, Skinner had made significant in-roads into both the engineering crowd and the popular consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s with his teaching machines.)
In 1967, engineers at Texas Instruments developed the first handheld electronic calculator. Thanks to a number of technical developments (single chip microcomputers, LED and LCD, for example), these portable computing devices quickly got better and cheaper. In the early 1970s, calculators could cost several hundred dollars, but by the end of the decade, the price had come down to make them more affordable and more commonplace.
And so, with some resistance and debate about their effect on learning, calculators began to enter the classroom. A new ed-tech market.
In 1976, Texas Instruments introduced what it boasts was “the first electronic educational toy”: the Little Professor.
The Little Professor served as a reverse calculator, of sorts. Instead of plugging in a mathematical expression in order to get an answer, the Little Professor provided the expression, and the user had to provide the answer — it is, as some have described it, an “instructional calculator.” According to Texas Instruments,
It functioned as a handheld drill-and-practice aid for basic math, and was designed to resemble a wise and friendly owl. The Little Professor suggested problems to students and rewarded them with a message on its display when they gave the correct answer.
Little Professor was priced to sell for under $20 and was an instant hit. Although production was ramped up, TI couldn’t make enough units to fill the orders for the Christmas season in 1976. Demand for 1977 was more than 1 million units.
The success of the Little Professor prompted Texas Instruments to brainstorm other possible electronic learning products.
The Development of the Speak & Spell
It was Texas Instruments engineer Paul Breedlove who reportedly came up with the idea of a learning aid for spelling. (Interestingly, one of the very first patents for educational devices was awarded in 1866: “an apparatus for teaching spelling.”) Breedlove’s idea was to build upon bubble memory, another TI research effort, and as such it involved an impressive technical challenge: the device should be able to speak the spelling word out loud.
Research began in 1976 — a three-month feasibility study with a $25,000 budget and a team of four: Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz.
In a 2008 interview with Vintage Computing, Richard Wiggins described the early development process:
Initially, there were only a very few people involved. At the initial meeting in November, Paul Breedlove came over to the research Labs with Gene Frantz and Larry Brantingham from the Consumer Products Group. The result of that meeting was that I was to propose a technique for generating the speech in the product. The challenge was that it had to be solid state (no pull strings!), cheap (meaning it used a low cost semiconductor technology), and the speech had to be good enough so that the user could understand the word out of context — a little bit harder than using a word in a sentence. Larry was a circuit designer and was tasked to determine if what I came up with could be implemented in an integrated circuit. Larry and I spent time together discussing various strategies, and Gene Frantz, who eventually became the project manager, kept the overall design moving forward.
As the program moved forward during 1977, additional people kept being added to the project. It was amazing to me how many people eventually become involved. [There were] people working on which spelling words to chose, what the product should look like, what it should be called, where it would be manufactured, and how it was to be marketed.
The original Speak and Spell was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1978. The 10“ x 7” orange plastic device contained a library of several hundred “frequently misspelled words.” The machine would say one out loud, and the user would type it via the pushbutton keyboard (later a membrane keyboard instead of raised buttons). As the user typed, the letters would appear on a VFD screen (later LCD) — one form of feedback. (Thanks, Skinner!) From the press release, we can see the other form of feedback: “Right answers earn verbal and visual praise; wrong answers receive patient encouragement to try again. A number of games are offered to intrigue children of all ages.”
The toy had a suggested retail price of $50. (That would be now about $181, adjusted for inflation.)
A Speaking, Teaching Machine
The Speak & Spell was not the first talking toy. But it was, as Texas Instruments boasted in its CES press release, the first with “no moving parts.” Other toys, such as Mattel’s Chatty Cathy, used pre-recorded voices on phonograph or tape, typically triggered by a pull-string or similar mechanism. These broke easily, as any parent would tell you. So “no moving parts” was a selling point for durability.
But to accomplish that with the Speak & Spell, Texas Instruments had to make an important engineering breakthrough in speech technology.
According to TI’s Richard Wiggins,
I promoted the choice of linear predictive coding to generate the speech signal from a small amount of data. Today, the speech could easily be recorded and stored in large digital memory chips. But in 1976, memory chips were not capable of storing that much data. We considered generating the speech from phonemes or sound fragments but the speech quality was not sufficient. A digital filter could be used and the time varying coefficients could be stored in memory but the amount of computations involved seemed too great.
Also, some kind of speech elements shorter than words were considered, but it appeared that the amount of computer processing to prepare data to drive the speech synthesizer would be too time consuming, and the resulting system would be very complex. We needed something simple to generate the speech sounds, and a preparation system for the data that wouldn’t be too complicated to execute.
The solution: the first linear predictive coding digital signal processor chip, the TMS5100. Each word was represented by a series of phonemes. This speech data was stored in the device’s memory (on 2 128 kilobit ROMs, at the time the largest capacity ROM in use); then when the Speak & Spell was told to say a word, the command was processed through a 4-bit microprocessor and speech synthesizer. Robert Phillips, a radio DJ from Dallas, was chosen to record the speech sounds, thanks to his clear, monotone voice, and according to Texas Instruments, “it marked the first time the human vocal tract had been electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon.”
“The Standard for Educational Toys”
The Speak & Spell was one of a trio of talking educational toys released by Texas Instruments that later included Speak & Read and Speak & Math (both launched in 1980).
Speak & Spell was incredibly popular and was sold around the world, with cartridges that offered localized versions of games and word libraries in both different accents (British English versus American English, for example) and languages (Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, and German).
The Speak & Spell was re-designed several times (the last time in 1992 for the Spanish market only), and Texas Instruments insists, “the basic learning principles and design concepts remain the standard for educational toys.”
But does the Speak & Spell teach?
According to research published in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies in 1982, users experienced a “significant increase in the spelling of words in the machine’s lexicon.” But that increase didn’t stick. “This appeared to be only a transitory increase because spelling performance on these words began to drop to pre-machine exposure levels once the opportunity to use the machine was removed. No improvement was observed in the spelling of words not in the machine’s lexicon.”
These aren’t uncommon findings, of course. Much of ed-tech is similarly ineffective.
Yet the Speak & Spell has become one of the most iconic pieces of education technology, referenced again and again in pop culture. The device appeared in Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and, most famously, in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
E.T. used the Speak & Spell to “phone home,” but it doesn’t actually teach spelling.
Hacking the Speak & Spell
But E.T. used it to “phone home.” And that’s why, despite the model upon which the instruction was designed and despite the lack of research to demonstrate it was truly an effective spelling aid, the Speak & Spell manages to break free of behaviorist teaching machines — because as E.T. demonstrated, the Speak & Spell is eminently hackable.
It can be dismantled and reprogrammed to do different things, to serve different purposes.
The Speak & Spell is often used in “circuit bending,” for example, whereby the device’s normal functioning is disrupted and distorted to make new sounds by placing an alligator on a particular spot on the circuit board. From Casper Electronics (which offers detailed instructions on circuit bending):
“So, if the Speak & Spell was saying ‘Spell the word PONY’ and you activate the ‘hold’ effect in the middle of ‘PONY’, it would sound like…..‘Spell the word POOOOOOOOOOONY’.” All of this has made the Speak & Spell a stock “instrument” in a lot of noise music.
Contrary to how many electronic devices are “closed” and constrained by design, Texas Instruments did not restrict usage of the various language cartridges by region. And the company has not responded negatively to those who “circuit bend” (or show others how to “circuit bend.”) That approach differs, it’s worth noting, from the one that TI took to lock down some of its other computing devices. In 2009, Texas Instruments filed a DMCA takedown request against programmers who’d posted instructions on how to “flash” a new operating system onto Texas Instrument’s TI–83 series graphic calculator; that is, a way to make its devices programmable beyond the TI software.
The Speak & Spell is a behaviorist teaching machine; but it retains for the user the capability to resist that. (Something that I’m sure B. F. Skinner would find quite distasteful.) First, of course, you have to unscrew the back cover, open it up, and hack…
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